In recent years, the design of superconducting electric machines has attracted the attention of researchers and scientists due to the unique properties of high temperature superconducting materials. This paper presents a 20 kW HTS induction motor with a double squirrel cage rotor, in which the HTS and copper bars are embedded in two different slots. The propose of this paper is the investigating of the rotor slot structure effect on electromagnetic torque characteristics such as starting and synchronous torque as well as related parameters such as air gap magnetic flux, and torque ripple. In addition, to better evaluate the performance of HTS-ISM with different rotor slot structures, mechanical output power and efficiency have been investigated. All models were analyzed under the same conditions such as number of poles, number of coils, frequency, voltage and current with finite element method with Ansys Maxwell software. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.